It seems tough to make a concept album with a lot of replay value, and despite more or less liking this it definitely went on the back burner the moment it was over. It's also very tough to make an album bemoaning the state of hiphop that doesn't just seem obnoxious, and I'm not sure this is a roaring success in terms of overcoming that obstacle. Masta Ace is a great battle rapper (I enjoyed his diss track here by far the most), but he doesn't have a knack for building a world in a novel or interesting way. There is a moment in the skit where Ace meets his presumably white suburban roommate at the Institute of Disposable Arts who's freestyling about being funkier than a 2-year-old yoga mat that killed me and 15 years later still seems to hit the nail on the head about a subset of the hip hop scene I may unwittingly belong to.
I downloaded this in .flac format which ironically prevents me from burning a CD and listening to it on the decent sound system in my car; suffice it to say I've never been more embarrassed to listen to something on my shitty low-end-eliminating earbuds. That OG electric guitar aesthetic that Hendrix operates within was not my sonic wheelhouse growing up, much to my dad's chagrin, and it's still a bit of a hurdle for me, but not enough to not appreciate Hendrix's striving to push that aesthetic to its limit in every given direction. I expected a lot of great technical playing and shredding and stuff, but not such an incredible stylistic variety, nor such apt songwriting. And aside from Hendrix himself I should shout out the drummer, pretty ferocious. I do regret not stopping after the original (?) 11 tracks, as solid as the following songs are they detract from a perfectly concise and complete album. Look forward to giving it another shot on more deserving equipment.
I've heard Gravity's Rainbow called the ultimate postmodern novel and I've heard this called the ultimate postmodern film, and I think by any definition Pynchon's work is more deserving of the title, but for what in many ways is a small film it leaves a huge enough afterglow to deserve major inclusion in some pantheon. I read an IMDb review positing interconnectedness and disconnectedness as analogous to yin and yang as the driving forces in the movie; I'm not sure I agree or know enough about yin and yang to agree, but those opposing themes do seem omnipresent throughout, albeit at different metafictional (or in the universe of the film, metaphysical) levels: the characters each in their own ways struggle with deep-seated societal and interpersonal disconnect, but at the 2nd order they're continually brought into contact with one another through complex strings of events that I guess can't be called coincidence in something so self-aware. But it's a lot more than an intellectually stimulating version of Babel or whatever, and I'm sure there are myriad approaches you could take to dissect it's meaning. Not my favorite movie or anything but one I enjoy thinking about more than most movies I like better.
No comments:
Post a Comment